SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 288 June, 2019 Yang Lian’s Exilic Poetry: World Poetry, Ghost Poetics, and Self-dramatization by Qing Liao Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS FOUNDED 1986 Editor-in-Chief VICTOR H. MAIR Associate Editors PAULA ROBERTS M ARK SWOFFORD ISSN 2157-9679 (print) 2157-9687 (online) SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series dedicated to making available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor-in-chief actively encourages younger, not yet well established scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. 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Yang Lian’s Exilic Poetry: World Poetry, Ghost Poetics, and Self-dramatization Qing Liao University of Pennsylvania 你们已无言, 而石头有了呼声. This stone stands as a witness for those who can’t speak. This dedication was composed by Chinese poet and author Yang Lian 楊煉 and translated by John Minford, then head of the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. It is inscribed upon a stone memorial hewn to resemble the geographical shape of China, dedicated to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The memorial stands outside St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Alten Road in Auckland, New Zealand. It was chosen by two Chinese poets, Yang Lian and Gu Cheng, who were then organizing demonstrations against the Chinese Communist Party’s declaration of martial law at the time they were attending an international conference on non-mainstream Chinese poetry at the University of Auckland. They were denied reentry into China, and their works were blacklisted. The two settled down in New Zealand, and in 1993 Gu murdered his wife and committed suicide, while Yang left his base in Auckland and started his second period of exile elsewhere in Europe. Incorporated into the white stone slab is a globalized poetic resonance: world poetry, one of the striking literary features of the post-Cold War era, an era also famously characterized by great historical changes including the rise of the free market and political upheaval. World poetry has been the subject of much debate. Both established and young scholars, such as Stephen Owen and Jacob Edmond, have contributed to the topic with great energy and sharp criticism. Owen explains world poetry as an invention propitious for the poetry of the Third World, because world poetry is able to provide those SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS NO. 288 poets with an opportunity to be recognized by international critics — in particular, Western critics — so that their poetry and that of others of their nation can enjoy the world’s attention, at least for that moment (28). He contends that world poetry writers must claim their nationality in an intricate manner, providing readers with a refreshingly “exotic” sentiment, but not in such a profound way that readers will lose interest (28). While Edmond recognizes world poetry as a new model and an opportunity for post–Cold War literary revitalization, his argument highlights “the multilateral cross-cultural referents and personal encounters that are neither local nor global, but that reveal the historical origins and contingencies of the local/global dichotomy” (3). He is more confident than Owen in the middle ground between local and global, which poets may explore to discover their true identities, rather than abuse to conceal their hypocrisy regarding alleged colonial Western values and their poor mastery of local literary conventions. The question of whether there is a middle ground between local and global — the supposed foundation of world poetry — remains contested. In order to avoid discussing world poetry in solely theoretical terms, this paper turns to the particular case of the modern Chinese poet Yang Lian. It focuses on his poetic collection Non Person Singular, a selection of short poems written between 1981 and 1991, including the cycle of poems entitled “Scenery in a Room,” which can be considered the prelude to his later exile poetry (Yang, introduction). Yang is typical of dissident Chinese poets after 1989 in that he garnered a transnational reputation for political engagement and later became a strong domestic seller with worldwide recognition. His Non Person Singular is also typical of world poetry in the sense that it centers on his exilic life, intertwining past Beijing with present Auckland. Most importantly, his extensive use of images corresponds to the world poetry tradition, in that it wisely seeks to decrease translation difficulty and to transform untranslatable words into translatable images. However, Yang also stylistically differs from other Chinese modernists due to his immersion in Chinese classical poems and his late start in reading Western literature in translation. This paper will investigate the stylistics of Yang’s short poems written during his period of exile in Auckland and deconstruct them under the tension between dissidence and accommodation to point out that world poetry should go beyond mere exploitation of the brutality of the state to produce dramatizations that stand on their own and that are successful on their own terms. 2 LIAO, “YANG LIAN’S EXILIC POETRY” Yang Lian, 2004. The photograph, by Song Zuifa, appeared in Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Brill, 2008), p. 138. 3 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS NO. 288 BIOGRAPHY OF YANG LIAN Yang Lian was born into a diplomatic family on February 22, 1955, during the period his parents were stationed at the Chinese embassy in Bern, Switzerland. His grandfather had accumulated great wealth, but Yang’s parents were radical idealists who donated all their belongings to the Chinese Communist Party. Before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, they left the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and retreated to universities to teach English, but Yang refused to learn even one English word, a decision he deeply regretted during his exile in Auckland, according to his interview with ifeng.com. However, his father forced him to study classical Chinese before he was even seven years old, requiring him to recite poems (whose meanings were then obscure to Yang) at the dining table (Yang, interview). Yang’s given name, “Lian” (炼), conveys his father’s literary expectations for him: the word refers to the process of refining coal or metals through the application of intense heat, and also denotes the refinement of words into finer combinations. When Yang was six years old, his parents brought him back to Beijing to live in the Yuanming Yuan neighborhood. His first poem “Apologia: To a Ruin” (“Zibai-gei yizuo feixu 自白—给一座废墟”) was dedicated to Yuanming Yuan. In the poem, he transforms the ruins of Yuanming Yuan into the graveyard of Chinese dynastic history, traditional culture, and myriads of lives. He wrote, “this testament becomes a curse muttered at my birth” (Yang, Renditions: Chinese Literature Today, introduction to Yang in 2001, he was separated from his parents in the 1970s and sent down to the countryside, following Mao Zedong’s “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” movement, which aimed to purge pro- bourgeois sentiments among Chinese youth through hard labor alongside peasants and workers. From 1974 to 1977, Yang served as a coffin-bearer and grave-digger in the suburbs of Beijing. He took as one of his first poetic subjects his experience of working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, focusing on his interactions with such elements of nature as the sun, moon, earth, river, night, etc. Yang’s preference for natural images was shared by the Menglong (“Misty” or “Obscure”) poets, who also abandoned the grandiose, meaningless words of political propaganda that had worn out China since the Cultural Revolution. Menglong poetry is conventionally translated as “Poetry of Shadows” or “Obscure Poetry” and gained its name from Chen Jingrong’s 陈敬容 translation of Baudelaire’s work “Dawn” (“Le crépuscule du matin”) from The Flowers of Evil (Les fleurs du mal) (Edmond, “The ‘Flâneur’ 4 LIAO, “YANG LIAN’S EXILIC POETRY” in Exile,” 380).